Mysterious Skin

Herzog and de Meuron’s otherworldly stadium in Munich.

Most sports stadiums that have been built in recent decades are hulking concrete monoliths or cute exercises in nostalgia, and they give the impression of having been crafted either by highway engineers or by theme-park designers. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, whose firm won the Pritzker Prize in 2001, appear quite determined to be architects, and that is why it is remarkable that the Swiss team was invited to create two of the most conspicuous sports venues in the world: the recently completed Allianz Arena, in Munich, which will house this year’s World Cup of soccer; and the Olympic Stadium in Beijing, which is now under construction and will be the centerpiece of the 2008 Summer Games. Both designs suggest that a sports arena, for all the blood and sweat on the field, can be an exalted space of otherworldly beauty.

The Allianz Arena has a delightfully surreal appearance. The exterior is covered in tufted, translucent material; viewed from afar, the stadium resembles a giant, quilted doughnut. At night, it becomes positively radiant: the façade is lit from within, which means that the entire arena glows. (The windows of a hundred and six luxury boxes can be partially discerned behind the curved scrim.) On most evenings, the building emits a soft white light, reflecting the silvery tone of the synthetic skin, but on nights when one of the two Munich soccer clubs has a home game—the teams share the stadium—it changes its skin color: red for Bayern Munich, blue for the Munich Lions. The shifting lighting schemes atop the Empire State Building seem timid compared with this chameleon.

The arena retains its allure during the day. The unusual material—ETFE, or ethylene tetra fluoro ethylene—gives the stadium a cushiony texture, as if it were an oversized, permanently moored blimp; you want to climb up and touch it. And its subtle white hue eerily duplicates the Munich sky on a cloudy winter afternoon—the stadium practically disappears. In the sun, it brightens. The 2,760 tufts—made of two sheets of ETFE, each 0.2 millimetres thick, which are sewn together and filled with air—are arranged in a strict diamond pattern, giving the façade a subtle sleekness. There are obvious jokes to be made about the Allianz Arena—one could say that it resembles the Michelin Man, or even a soccer ball—but Herzog and de Meuron are too good to play trite visual games, and the building easily transcends such literal-minded comparisons.

The Allianz Arena also serves its function superbly. The membrane-like roof, which is retractable, permits ultraviolet light to filter through, allowing the natural turf on the playing field to thrive. Nineteen of the exterior tufts tilt open on days when a breeze is welcome. The stands, arrayed on three tiers, are unusually steep, creating nearly flawless sight lines; the elegant gray seats, curved and comfortable, look like miniature versions of the famous egg chairs by Arne Jacobsen. Like a great opera house, the stadium seems more intimate than it is, and you feel connected to the field even if you are in the upper tier.

The Allianz Arena is on Munich’s northern fringe, near the intersection of two Autobahns, and it is designed to be as exciting when you zip past it in your BMW as it is when you approach it on foot. It has the magnetic pull of a true icon: I was glad I wasn’t behind the wheel when I rode in a car to the arena at night, since I couldn’t take my eyes off its luminous form and unsettling monumentality. Buildings aren’t supposed to be so huge and so soft. These days, we tend to associate softness with spinelessness, as if worthy architectural ideas had to be expressed in terms of crisp, hard form. (Think of the brutal angularities of Rem Koolhaas or Zaha Hadid.) With this gently radical stadium, Herzog and de Meuron prove that softness is not for sissies.

Unlike most American stadiums, the Allianz Arena is not surrounded by acres of parking lots, and the visual approach to the arena is as meticulously designed as anything within the building itself. Parking space is embedded in a partially sunken multilayered structure, atop which is the main pedestrian entry path to the arena. The path is lined with enormous lamps that look like hot-air balloons—whimsical echoes of the façade—and it begins at a train-and-bus station, so that people who arrive by car and those who take public transportation merge together as they walk along the elevated boulevard.

When you enter the arena, you go up one of several monumental staircases tucked between the pillowy exterior and the concrete inner structure of the stadium. The staircases curve as they rise, reflecting the rounded shape of the stadium. The stairs are one of the best things in the building. You get enticing glimpses of the angular metal framework that supports the façade as you walk up, and, at night, the colored lights create a lurid atmosphere that bears a beguiling resemblance to German Expressionism: “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” transported to the realm of sport.

Oddly, one of the few significant precedents for this building is also in Munich: Frei Otto and Günter Behnisch’s great Olympic Stadium of 1972, with its lyrical Plexiglas roof. Compared with the Allianz Arena, the Olympic Stadium is just a jaunty tent stretched over a conventional stadium, but it was quite something in its time, and it still looks good. Herzog and de Meuron, however, have made a more profound statement about the potential of sensual form to achieve epic grandeur, and there are no self-indulgent gestures: every aspect of their design amplifies the experience of attending a soccer game.

The supple exterior of the Allianz Arena would seem to overwhelm everything else about the building, until you go inside and discover how well it works, and how much else there is in Herzog and de Meuron’s repertoire. The same thing can be said about their design for the de Young Museum, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, which opened this past fall. The museum’s façade—made up of intricately textured sheets of embossed and perforated copper—is so dazzling that you expect the building to be an empty showpiece; yet its interior is useful and intelligent. The museum is as dark as the Munich stadium is light, and as hard-edged as Munich is rounded, but in both cases Herzog and de Meuron have managed to invent a wholly new kind of exterior, and marry it to a fully realized building. They use these seductive skins to lure us into their architecture, but they don’t leave their imaginations at the door.

The original de Young Museum, a grandiose, Spanish-colonial structure, was so badly damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake, in 1989, that it couldn’t be repaired. In 1998, the museum’s trustees decided to erect a new building, and to hold a competition to find an architect. Herzog and de Meuron, who are based in Basel, had designed the Tate Modern, in London, but they were primarily known for small, minimalist spaces—such as the exquisite Goetz Collection, a private museum in Munich—and they hadn’t completed any major commissions in the United States. They had, however, been among the three finalists for the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and although their scheme was deemed too experimental for the conservative Modern, being on its short list raised Herzog and de Meuron’s status. In 1999, they won the de Young competition.

The museum consists of two sections: a long, horizontal wing, containing the galleries and several internal garden courts; and an unusual tower, a kind of twisting parallelogram, containing the museum’s education and study centers. The tower rises a hundred and forty-four feet, and it has an observatory room at the top. Its odd form seems willful, and it is based on an unnecessary conceit: the top section is perfectly aligned with the street grid of San Francisco, which can be seen from the observatory’s windows. No matter; it’s a well-wrought piece of sculpture, and the tower and the three-level main wing form a strong composition, a modern version of a cathedral and its campanile.

The remarkable pointillist façade covers both the main wing and the tower, further unifying them. It is actually a computer-generated pattern of dots, a gargantuan version of the pixels that make up a digital photograph. Such an effect could seem slick, but the building feels dignified and compellingly strange. It is smooth, like so many modern buildings, yet it is as textured as a rococo church. And do those dots make a picture of something, or are they simply ornament? They are both things at once—strictly speaking, the dots form a picture of dappled light filtering through a canopy of trees, but it comes across as a tantalizing abstraction, a color-field painting without the color.

The ambiguity of the copper façade entices you into an entry court, and, from there, into a high central lobby. The layout is irregular but clear and easy to grasp. The galleries are gracious and accommodating, with varying ceiling heights, natural light, and, in some cases, lovely views of Golden Gate Park. The twentieth-century galleries, on the main floor, have stone floors, skylights, and white walls; the upstairs galleries, which contain smaller and earlier works, have wood floors, colored walls, and, in several rooms, wooden ceilings. The tight, triangular garden courts bring the expansive landscape of the park inside, with a special intensity. Throughout the museum, the flow through space is as logically programmed as in any classical building. The art—in particular, a spectacular triptych by Ed Ruscha, commissioned for the lobby—looks superb in the variety of settings that Herzog and de Meuron have crafted for it. Walking through the de Young, you begin to wonder why we tend to think of new museums as being either potent works of architecture or sensitive environments for art, when this museum so deftly manages to be both.

Last year, Herzog and de Meuron also completed work on an expansion of the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis. The addition is clad in aluminum mesh that has been delicately crinkled, softening the most hard-edged of materials. Both museums have a kind of painstaking sensuousness. They are sombre and inviting at the same time. Can there be such a thing as Swiss passion? Herzog and de Meuron seem determined to prove that this is not an oxymoron—that utter precision need not come at the cost of emotional engagement with architecture.

Herzog and de Meuron’s office in Basel, once tiny, now has a hundred and seventy employees, and they are getting all kinds of work. Ian Schrager just hired them to design a condominium project on Bond Street, in lower Manhattan, for which the architects have devised a façade that will have large plate-glass windows separated by heavy, rounded glass columns—a shimmery, twenty-first-century version of SoHo’s cast-iron façades. It is a brilliant scheme, and Schrager and his partner, Aby Rosen, are building it pretty much as the architects designed it.

Herzog, who is the firm’s spokesman, has positioned himself less as an architectural theorist than as an acute observer of culture who happens to design serious buildings. The point of his practice, he told me recently, is “not just to make a beautiful object.” Ambiguity, he said, lies at the heart of his designs. He wants his architecture to make a point about the human psyche. “Architecture must deal with doubt—it is not just about style, or ‘I like this’ or ‘I don’t like that,’ “ he said. Herzog is known for making delphic pronouncements, and his words tend to be more pensive than the sweeping absolutes that architects like Koolhaas adopt. Life is a complicated, painful business, he seems to be saying, and architecture should be neither an escape from stress nor a literal representation of it but, rather, a means of achieving complex insight. Herzog rejects the idea that architecture should provide either simple physical comfort or intellectual challenge—to him, these two things are not mutually exclusive.

I asked him about his firm’s turn from the austere visual vocabulary that defines his early work. “The really interesting thing about ornamentation is the strong psychological side inherent in it,” Herzog said. Ornament, as he sees it, is a reflection of the intricacies of the human mind. The Beijing Olympic Stadium, for example, will look like a vast mesh of concrete sticks, crossing one another in every direction—a network that is both literally and symbolically a web. It will be impossible to tell where structure ends and decoration begins, for they are one and the same. The result should be disconcertingly gorgeous.

“I am more interested in the dark side—the dark side inside comfort, the comfort inside the dark side,” Herzog said. “It is like the films of Hitchcock—that’s how life is. The dark moment, the criminal moment, the sexual moment, sits within everything else. Perhaps it is strange to hear this from someone who became known as a minimalist. But minimalism is just another guise, another form of dress.” ♦

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